Gideon is asking that people not directly link to the badges on his server, but instead download them and host them on their own blog. In a comment, Scott asks for some code to do this. That gave me an idea: I’ll host the images and provide the code that links to them.

Here’s the code to get Gideon’s “No Marketing Zone” badge:

And here’s the code to get Gideon’s “PD Blog” badge:

The original badges on Gideon’s site were JPEG images, and they were about 32kb in size. I’ve converted them to 16-color PNG files that are only 4kb. They look about the same to me, but eat up less bandwidth.

I’ve been playing around with some of the tools offered by Amazon Web Services, so I’m hosting these badges using the beta of the Amazon CloudFront Content Distribution Network. This means that to allow the badges to load quickly on users’ browsers, cached copies of both badges are hosted on servers in Ashburn VA, Dallas/Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Palo Alto, Seattle, St. Louis, Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Asia, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.

I’ll be paying Cloudfront about 17 cents per Gigabyte of download, which works out to about 75 cents per million hits to the badge image.

Important Note: These badges link back to this page, so visitors to your site can find out what they’re all about and get code for their own badges.

This means, perversely, that these anti-marketing badges are marketing tools for this blog, because people and search engines will find their way here from your blog by way of the badge. If that’s not acceptable to you, please feel free to download the badge images and host them however you want.

I can’t tell if you’re serious…did I screw up? I can link to your page, if you’d like. I’m really just doing this to play around with CloudFront and make the low-bandwidth images available, since the ones you got from Heather were a bit hefty.

I’ve added a proper license link to the page.

You can, of course take the images and code back and use them yourself…